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If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)

Maunsell sea forts, built in the Thames estuary and operated by the Royal Navy, were to deter and report German air raids following the Thames as a landmark, and attempts to lay mines by aircraft in this important shipping channel.

Maunsell also designed forts for anti-aircraft defence. These were larger installations comprising seven interconnected steel platforms, five carried guns arranged in a semicircle around the control centre and accommodation while the seventh, set further out than the gun towers, was the searchlight tower.

The Micronation of Sealand is only the tower at Roughs off Harwich, which, lying outside of British Territorial Waters can be technically declared as independant - and has.
Shivering Sands, as reported on the Wiki, lies further south at the Thames entrance. At various times it has been occupied by "pirate radio" stations and at one point, it's said, there was even a gun fight over possession there. As far as I know this all ended decades ago when the UK formally asserted that Shivering Sands and Red Sands etc were inside territorial waters and put a stop to all the malarky.
I've sailed past the Sands and it's an awesome sight even at a distance. There's something surreal about its shape and isolation in what looks like deep sea.
It's one of the things I really like about the UK. Just about everywhere you go there's some sort of historical wartime "something". Not an impressive "something" always but...